another travelogue 5

August 24, 2006

we missed the 2:30 paint a cardboard bug face under a tree on the promenade slot and when we got there the tiny table covered in cut-out cardboard and poster paints was full of 5 year-olds with ribbons in their hair looking like something out of the summer mini boden catalogue and so they wanted to do it all the more but it was all being packed up at 3 so we said it was ok because we hadn’t even been the 2km up to the end of the garden yet and there was a brrriliant view there and anyway it was under the shade of the trees that way you see so let’s just do that and then we can come back and do this when it’s not so busy ok? as it turns out, it’s 2km uphill through the dusty gravel path and at the end there’s a rather well concealed mobile phone mast next to a wooden playground where you can climb on a dinosaur and swing down a vine and go round and round on a big round thing where there’s shavings all over the floor and a stone lookout that’s bizarrely cold but is full of 5 dutch people who all have calippos that miraculously haven’t melted which they must have kept in a tiny fridge they carry around in their backpack so it wasn’t all lost because now it’s downhill and round the corner so they can run all the way until their faces go #660000 and they collapse sous l’arbre and don’t want to do that painting anymore anyway. but she’s still there, cutting out fox’s heads from sheets of cardboard and lo, there’s 3 chairs and so everyone gets to have a go while I lay down on the grass and try to close my eyes while an italian baby is taking it’s first steps in front of the whole family tree and does really well to make it all the way over to where my sunglasses are and even better to step right on them. ah. well done! your first steps! grrr.

but we haven’t seen those mad bushes yet. where are they then? well, we walked straight past them when we went on the low path to the belvedere didn’t we? did we? yes. oh. so they’re down there. are they? yes. d’you know, I’m just too hot now, I can’t be bothered. we can come back another day can’t we. yes, but we won’t. yeah, we will. no we won’t and we have to walk past them to get out anyway so come on, let’s just walk slowly that way and we can get a nice cup of tea at the end. alright. where are they? that way. no, they’re that way aren’t they? no, because, look at the map, look, we’re here, they’re there, but we’re actually coming around this way so if you turn it upsaie down, yeah, right, see?

and there they were

another travelogue 4

August 23, 2006

ooh look, there’s one here from 1974. it’s got french people and german tourists in flares and tank tops, see, they did wear them over here as well, but I don’t think those opening times are right and I didn’t bring any francs this time so we might want to dig a little deeper into the black hole that is the box of visitor attraction leaflets in the corner and see if there’s anything that has been updated since the troglodites lived in the walls. what does the rough guide say then. ooh, do you think they’ll like a garden? what’s a belvedere?

as we skirted around the edge of the river with the aircon set to wallpaper stripper we could see a number of things that looked like they might be a chateau with beautifully restored ornamental gardens as there’s apparently hundreds of the things around here and we’re not even on the right side of the river are we? hang on the map’s upside down and we passed that bridge half an hour ago and that was closed anyway so that’s why we’re on this side anyway look, if you look really closely on the bit where it folds and has gone all unreadable you can just make out the word Marqueyssac on that side of the river see? we’re supposed to be on that side. ooh look, nice chateau. give it to me. no, you look where you’re going, give it here. oh. but that’s not right. we should be there now. much as I’d like to see Josephine Baker’s place we didn’t plan to go there today so what the hell are we doing in the driveway anyway, oh, hang on, you see here where it says Marqueyssac, in this side of the river, right? well, we’re here, right? but the litte chateau symbol it is referring to is this one over here, not this one over here. that one is Castelnaud. no, hang on, it’s Beynac. anyway, you see what they’ve done right? look out you’re a bit close to the edge. they’ve put the label on the other side of the river, cos they ran out of space to get Marqueyssac on that side. we should be there. where are we now? here. oh.

there’s untold hilarity driving through enormous field sprinkler systems with the windows down when it’s 39° outside and you’ve just worked out just how much unleaded the aircon is using while it’s permanently on stun as we head for the car park which directs us everywhere on the left-hand side of the road which throws me for a minute but soon we’re parked up and as we leave the command module for the first time in about an hour the hot air peels the skin off our faces a bit like that bit in terminator when paula hamilton or whatever her name is is clinging on to the playground fence and then she gets blasted away by an apolcalyptic blastwave but still manages to hang on with her skeleton fingers and then wakes up. our first full day out and we’ve arrived. have you got the money? I thought you had it. no, I said can you put it in the bag. is it not in the back? why don’t you look? it’s not in the bag. what do you mean it’s not in the bloody bag. dad, I’m hot. dad, are we going in? what is it? it’s the garden we told you about. where is the money then? look again. it’s not there. why not? I don’t know. you’re joking. er, no. right, that’s it, back in the car. oh, hang on, here it is.

slap

another travelogue 3

August 22, 2006

this must be it. is this is? looks like it.

after the slow dash across never-ending vineyards and almost so beautiful I’m bored of it now it goes on forever rolling countryside sprinkled with chateaux and chats and eau and the odd chien, we arrived at stop number one of our, well, 2 stop tour, which was apparently 2 nights in a youth hostel inside a cistercian abbey in cadouin where they used to have in the 12th century a towel that was wrapped around the head of jesus christ on a bike that all sorts of people used to crawl to on their knees from all over the place until someone said they didn’t make towels in those days and anyway that came from persia or something and people started wriggling on their back to places like lourdes and a bloke in limoges who had an ancient baguette shaped like the virgin mary’s right arm instead. because we are the cheapskates we are, we arrived in france 2 days before we could move into our gite to avoid overhiked school holiday airfares, so had to get somewhere to stay for the first 2 nights which wasn’t a bed and breakfast by bordeaux airport run by steve and mary who moved out 5 years ago and have just about recreated eastbourne in the dusty old dining room or a novotel by the ring road, and so after a bit of searching around and a swift 30 nicker to get our YHA cards, we dropped a line to a very nice woman in the abbey who said hell yes they’ve got a family room thursday and friday night if we just bring our YHA cards it’ll be 126 euros for 2 nights. lest we forget, that’s 126 euros for 5 people for 2 nights including breakfast, which is about 150 dollars or something, but even better, only about 80 quid which is what it would have be each if we’d gone to hotel flightpath. and the place is fricken brilliant. it’s like having a room in a medieval reenactment, but without the annoying people dressed up as archers and wenches at the weeked in a field in loughborough. there’s still scratches on the bedroom wall from about 600 years ago and we just spent our time lounging in the courtyard, cooking our pasta in the shared kitchen with lots of middle class french people like us who are all very polite and wholesome and we realise we’re really on holiday now and the children gaily skip around the cloisters and little baby jesus appears from a packet of chocolate milk and winks at us and the world sings hallelujah as angels come down from heaven and turn back the corners of our bed sheets and lift us up the stairs and into bed with their little wings and the sun sets over the spire and everything becomes one.

actually, some kids loitered around outside our window talking bollocks in french until about 1 in the morning by which time the neighbours with tiny children are throwing fruit out the window at them and a storm comes over and unleashes about 2 inches of rain in 10 minutes at which point everyone is thorougly pissed off and wonders what the hell we’re doing here, nice as it is.

another travelogue 2

August 18, 2006

they sat behind me all the way talking some rubbish about the distance to the moon in light years which was just ridiculous so 1 second before the enormous hoover that passed for a plane we were in touched down at Bordeaux aiport I leaned over the back of my chair and pointed the camera out the window behind me to take pictures of wheels and tarmac, causing the 17 year old there to drop his fanta into his lap, short-circuiting his iPod mid-Lost Prophets. that’ll teach him to talk nonsense. he didn’t speak all the way to the terminal, but mind you, that was only about 20 yards, and then he started piping up again in a competition with his brother to see who could be the most ignorant. but it doesn’t matter. we’re in France now and soon we’ll be skipping through fields of sunflowers and peering through arches, laughing and taking pictures and ruffling each other’s hair like they do in those films where they’re trying to show you what an idyllic family life somebody had in flashback before they got trapped in a never-ending spiral of depression in their hotel bedroom following the acrimonious divorce and the kids moving to South America with mum’s new boyfriend just before they throw a tumbler of jack daniels at the tv in despair and then it cuts to a scene of coworkers looking concerned about their appearance and whispering behind their hands just before they get called to the boss’s office with glass walls and they have an animated silent altercation which leads to inevitable termination of employment and them storming out but it’s ok because they’ll meet a beautiful innocence-lost young woman in the alley they’ll spend the rest of the film looking for the meaning of life in elevators and it’ll end and the football will be next or at least a reality programme about perfectly coiffured ex-cops who chase other people’s pets-gone-bad for a living which you shouldn’t really watch but you’re hooked and it’s 3am before you realize it and so begins the never-ending spiral of depression in your hotel room as you have an epiphany of worthlessness during the ad break when you jolt yourself awake to find you’ve dribbled on the remote control and you now have to watch adverts for dog food that comes in foil sachets. forever. or something.

as my Avis Preferred customer profile had the wrong AmEx card details on it before we left, I had to make a regular voucher booking – yes, shock horror, no corporate car hire queue jumping and getting all self-satisfied in the process – we trundled the trolley piled high with suitcases and car seats and hand luggage (lots of it) to the Avis desk and did the driving license/passport/visa/no I won’t crash thankyou stuff and headed for the little kiosk in the car park. as we passed through the terminal doors and out of the air-conditioned relative comfort of the Bordeaux airport terminal building we hit a wall of what could best be described as ‘fricken hot air’. actually, that could probably be describe better, but that’s essentially what it was. 39 degrees and a hot wind blowing across the tarmac and we had that moment were you realise it’s lovely and hot but you know you’re gonna be moaning about it in about 10 seconds you English moany old English persons. anyway, the kiosk turned out to be preferred customers and plebs at the same time. ha ha! so I handed some bits of paper over and they let me know we had an oopel astrah, which I said I know but she said it’s that one over there the silver one and I said that’s an estate and she said sure eet iz and I said fricken a, that’s a bonus and she said nothing and looked at me like a stupid tourist. which is what I was, so I said goodbye and she said nothing and I said thanks and she said something to the guy in the Avis polo shirt who was picking his ear and wiping it on his trousers, so we just wheeled over to the astra, chucked everything in the back, got the kids out again and put them in the back seats, located what looked like the exit and drove straight onto the ring road, going 9 miles in the wrong direction.

another travelogue 1

August 17, 2006

there’s nothing like a trip to a regional airport to take a trip to a regional airport, so instead of parking in a pink elephant for a million pounds a day we shelled out seven pound fifty for a nice black taxi to Norwich International Airport to start our tour of bastides and empty roads. still, as there were five of us and black cabs aren’t the best luggage transporters (aside from people as luggage), we rumbled up the boundary road with 20kg suitcases and child seats flying around our heads, but it’s a small price to pay to pay a small price to fly. being the inconsiderate parents we are, we took our children out of school for 2 days in order to get cheap fares and so deprived them of valuable end-of-year educational experiences like stacking chairs or playing Monopoly, so I guess we’ll burn for that, or at least get in trouble with the school govenors. oh, hang on, I’m a school governor. I guess it’s alright then. anyway, the fares were a nice regional price with flybe.com and we’re looking forward to 2 and a half weeks in whatever you want to call the region of France we’re going to (Perigord, Lot-et-Garonne, Bastide country, Lot Valley, Haut Angenais or something, Aquitaine, South-West France – delete as appropriate to whatever bed and breakfast or rough guide you’re reading).

Norwich International is undergoing extensive redevelopment to make it a 21st century airport, so that means there’s a couple of partitions in the departure hall and some workman round the back smoking tabs. I say departure hall, but that might be overstating it slightly. departure room maybe. departure shed. something like that. anyway, we get everything shuffled through the baggage check, including our hastily wrapped up in a Daisy and Tom plastic bag child seats that went through the ‘special’ baggage check for ‘stupid’ items, make our way to the departure utility room and then, as we’re filtering through the final security check onto the tarmac, Sam proceeds to fiddle with and break a plastic leaflet stand, scattering 1000s of NIA and special offer leaflets over the floor and clattering deliberately (I’m sure) super-noisy plastic leaflet holders over an acre of hard concrete flooring in such a way that I’m sure many hands were hovering over panic alarm buttons throughout the airport just 1 step from total security incident. in the end, the Polish cleaner was very helpful with picking them all up again as I tried to reconstruct the 17 plastic holders into the 1 metal rack while presenting my boarding card and passports for the flight we were now already late for that we could see through the window about 10 yards away.

as I’d pre-booked everything, including seats, it didn’t matter anway, so we took our seats on the plane, which had propellers and wings on the top, which was a novelty for us, until we realized we would actually be sat next to the engines all the way and they’re not like jets which just kind of whine, they’re props, which mean they rattle the whole bloody seat until you’re feeling like your teeth are falling out. whatever. we’re on holiday now so nothing matters. we taxi around a bit and then we’re climbing like a snail might climb into the sky and I’m pressing my face against the plastic windows because I can see my house from here, just like on that Camel album.

if you know what I mean by that, you’re probably Geoff Arnold.

i’ll be leaving now

August 16, 2006

that was just a practice. I wanted to make sure that when I did that you all got to the side and climbed out. because it was a practice, you can all get back in, in a minute! but if it wasn’t a practice, I would be telling you that we need to go out that side door there, there, yes, that one, and straight out onto the grass. now, I know you’ll be all wet and it might be a bit cold for you, but we only need to go out there if it’s an e m e r g e n c y, ok? and I’ll tell you if it is, but right now, it isn’t, so very quietly, q u i e t l y, you can go back to whichever end you were and, use the steps, get back in.

what if someone has been sick? does we do that like she said if someone has just been sick, like, eeeeugh. well, no, that’s not really an emergency like she means, I mean, yes, you have to get out, but it’s not an e m e r g e n c y like she means. that’s just unpleasant, but you still have to promise me that you’ll get out quickly if someone does do that, ok? and then they have to take it all out and that’s why they shut it for, like, an hour or something? no, all day, they have to shut it all day to get it out. don’t they just gather it up and put it in the bin? no, no, they have to empty everything out, drain it, clean it all, fill it up again and clean all that and that takes all day. where do they put it? in the bin? no, no, they drain it, it goes down the drain. like taking the plug out. oh. do they have to do that now? no, that was just a practice. and being sick isn’t an emergency. I don’t think.

am I going to sunflower club now? yes

it all sounds like big star to me

August 15, 2006

off. on. off. slap. on again.

if you want to take it all the way back then you might as well be stumbling around the city with a three-quarter length mac, 15 camels and spikes in the front then grope your way along the arse end of town until you can smell the toilets and the sweat congealing on the walls. you can be sick just there. and then get him to look after your pint while you flail around like a halfwit with your eyes closed mouthing the words like you wrote them which you didn’t but you did in your head even if you can’t even hear them because they’re shouting them like, really loud, like when your ears were bleeding the other week when they did requiem. I know, just fall over and lie on the floor. it worked last week. what’s that? pardon? I dunno, what is it? it smells funny, go on, smell it. jeeeesus! I can’t breath! why’s my heart doing that?

never saw any of that stuff again but realised i dint know nuffin so got on with collapsing by the river and then tramping 2 miles without a shirt on into someone’s bedroom where they thought you, at least, would understand why visage were actually like, you know, genius. except you didn’t talk like that. in fact you didn’t say anything at all for 10 years and communicated through 4-tracks and scrabble which was a lengthy, but obviously, most profound process. no. it was rubbish. there’s the river. it’s all dark.

flick.

55 minutes to impact

August 13, 2006

there’s a steady stream of them now, appearing from nowhere like the shopkeeper and scurrying up the road to the new bar and grill where the fountain used to be except it didn’t used to be there it used to be where our neighbour’s house is so really they should have called it the doctor’s surgery bar and grill or something which would have be historically much more accurate and would have made for a much more interesting illuminated sign draping over the flint wall onto earlham road. there’s one kitchen over there and one kitchen over here, but they seem to make the things that come in huge trays covered in tinfoil in the kitchen over there and then carry it out the back and 50 yards up the road to the kitchen over here for some reason. maybe they don’t have a huge oven on this side of the road, although it smells like they do when you’re walking back from the city and you hit the corner of the health centre and you get that smoked/grilled/charred/incinerated smell wafting up the road, past the back gardens and open bedroom windows of the next terrace. which is nice.

I sat on a bench outside the nat west and gave up for a while when it was still hot and people were masticating over some gregg’s pastries. they do them in the round here so you can never really see anyone else which is normally a good thing as they’re all inbred and have diabetes apparently so you do have to twist your back around to cop a look at today’s detrius. sometimes there’s some abstract kind of point to all this, but normally it degenerates into a blurred convulsion upon witnessing a family from heartsease who appear to have not seen a pie for weeks or a can of coke and so are gorging like trough-dwellers and dripping body parts onto their guts. take me to the hospital.

black and white

August 11, 2006

sticky up in the morning and all thick with vegatables and crushed beetles I stumble into the den and with a swift half of John Bull I’m gawping at Bomb Jack for 3 and a half hours until I’m round the clock and Dave is getting very grumpy sat on his spike in the corner where the others are blowing smoke rings into the night with ginsters and mccoys on tap. I don’t know what was in that stuff but it did the job, even in the rain, when it all dripped down your back like a spikey duck with nails in it’s boots and an old lumberjack shirt with the sleeves pulled off. remember theatre of hate? go on, just shake your fists out at right angles for a bit while you stomp around Pennies with a crowbar down your trousers which are halfway up your leg and then turned up for good measure. 17 rum and blacks and I never felt a thing. it was only when I wasn’t allowed to put my head on her antimacassars that it struck me as ridiculous, but now of course I’d kill for it even though I could do without the Camels and Coke.

I do have a picture of it somewhere that’s far too scary for small children which is probably festering in another life somewhere under a pile of old plastic nameplates from Watchmoor Park and business cards with japanese on the back that I never used having never been there or met any japanese on business although I was assured at the time it was really the thing to do. that’s probably when it started going, being the sedentary sloth in the call centre while British Gas were poking thier Ultra 2 with a stick and I was secretly passing it onto hardware support in CMS and running off for a 32plus.

twitchy delete fingers

August 9, 2006

two and a half inches of colour and almost 497 to review and critique, like it’s some tiny tots culture show on speed, I’m gauging out the eyes of urbanites with a rusty balloon and projecting life experiences onto a whitewashed lockup in Baslidon, where we’ve collected the lives of the south and kicked them into the corner by an upturned banana crate and a discharged fire extingiusher, as the detrius of the summer collects under our fingernails and we scrape it away with the end of the kitchen devil we’re about to cut the brie with.

you should allow yourself 3 and a half hours to complete at least 2 of these tasks and assume that you’ll be hanging inches from a wet cleric at some point, where the wires meet the trees and the plastic tokens are reserved for the fat ladies in heels who are trit-trotting across the car park like some jaded gibbons in drag. there’ll be a point where you inclip yourself from the earth and will scrape your ligaments on a moon crater where bill schmidt or whatever his name was collected enough rock to build a pretty nice moon rockery in the front garden where the water just floats about instead of cascading serenely over the stones. he was a scientist, you see, not an astronaut. that’s your trouble. you’re an idiot, not an astronaut.

an a clear day last week we saw Jupiter and four moons but I didn’t get any of that, so I’m sticking with the carp that gummed my fingers and the airport pole with the dead man’s hooks on. 3 hours later the props are spinning, so let’s get out of here. we left a cup of coffee on the chest of drawers and turned into bad cheese. that’ll learn me. hahaha.

Things what I writ